Today, it is quite common to personalize documents with, for example, a reader's name or other information specific to one reader or a group of readers. An example is an advertising mass mailing that has been personalized with the addressee's name, offered goods, and special prices on the offered goods, all selected and calculated according to the addressee's past purchasing from the company making the offer. This document personalization exists in both World Wide Web (web) documents and printed documents.
The process of generating the personalized copies of documents includes three major phases: creation, production and rendering. Creation includes planning, design, programming, and authoring. Production is the phase in which target media formats are generated for rendering a specified set of personalized copies. Rendering is the phase in which printing or web-presentment actually occurs.
The production of such documents generates output format specification for rendering personalized instances of the documents in the desired target media (e.g., PostScript for print, available from Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., USA). Existing tools are either media-specific (e.g., Darwin for print, available from CreoScitex, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada), or use rendering instructions that have no explicit specification of variability.